Oct. 26 - Southern Indiana

We woke up to partly cloudy skies, but with a forecast of rain showers, so we hit the road with the hope that the rain might not come. It was raining before we hit our first destination, French Lick. Our plan was to take random roads to get there and see the sights along the way. We found a county park that wasn't marked well on the map that was near English. It had a lot of camping spaces and we saw some interesting port-a-pots that were clearly marked for the different genders.


We stopped at a historic landmark on the way; Initial Point which we thought was a war marker from a battle but turned out to be where the state was divided into 6 even areas by Thomas Jefferson. It's still used today for plotting.


We stopped by Youngs Creek to have a picnic lunch and while the soup was on, Bob took a short hike in the woods.





We made it to French Lick and went to the French Lick Winery. We really didn't like their wines at all except one that Bob liked; Rhubarb Wine. So we purchaced one Rhubarb to take home and a replacement cork screw (ours was bending out of shape)and hit the road again. There are a couple of huge hotels and spas in town, plus a casino, but we we're interested in any of them.

Our next destination was Paoli that has a Pinoneer Mother's Memorial Forest. Which is a place in the Hoosier National Forest where no trees were ever cut down. So this virgin forest looks like it did to the pioneers when they lived here.
We made one wrong turn on the way and ended up seeing these guys by the side of the road.


The Holiday Inn in Corydon was our next stop for a short rest and then we went to Turtle Run Winery just a few miles outside of Corydon and made a huge discovery. This winery has been producing for just about 6 years but Jim the winemaker is brewing up some great premium wines. He doesn't make sweet wines like a lot of the Indiana wineries do, but he adjusts the yeasts in the process of making the wines like they do in Europe and uses different types of oak barrels and the results were just amazeing (both white and red wines). We ended up buying a case, but I'm sure all trips to the south will include a stop here or we may be asking UPS to do some delivering of this stuff to us.